The Bomb-Murder of Harry T. Moore

(January 1952)

Two days before Christmas, Parade, the
Sunday picture magazine, devoted an entire page to a report from Key
West, Fla., where President Truman had just completed another of his
many vacations. It was the story of a 12-year old boy named Johnny
Lawler, who had been encouraged by his parents to hang around for a
chance to see Truman, and who finally succeeded and even shook Truman’s
hand and then was so thrilled that he did not wash his own hand for
several days. Johnny was quoted as asking his father, “Say, how did Mr.
Truman get to be President?” By working hard, his father replied, and
then Johnny said, “I’ll do the same because some day I want to be
President.”

There is something horrible in the thought that people are actually
educating their children to emulate a man like Truman, the biggest
strikebreaker in US history, the one who ruthlessly gave the order to
murder hundreds of thousands of helpless civilians with the atom bomb;
the hypocrite who advocated civil rights laws to get elected and then
dropped them like a hot potato; the initiator of a witch hunt that is
destroying our civil liberties.

Truman worked hard, all right — he worked hard obeying the orders of
a crooked machine politician named Pendergast, and he has been working
hard since then obeying the orders of the capitalist class, up to and
including the order to intervene in a so-called police action that has
already cost the US over 100,000 admitted casualties in Korea.

Johnny Lawler would be far better off if he hitched his wagon to
another star. And what a star there was in his own state — a Negro,
unknown to almost everyone until his death, a man who never committed
any crimes but who also became great by working hard. That was Harry T.
Moore, a hard worker, but one who worked on the side of the people and
not against them.

Harry Moore: A Truly Noble Man

It seems a shame that we never heard of Harry T. Moore
until after Christmas night, when his life and his wife’s life were
ended by a bomb that blew up their home in Mims, Florida. Because he
was a truly great and noble human being, the kind of man we should look
up to for guidance in how to live our lives, a man whose memory we
should keep forever fresh and green.

He was a school principal, and better off than most Negroes in the
South. But he was not content to think only of himself. He joined the
fight to win equal salaries for Negro teachers, and for doing that was
fired from his job. That would have silenced some people, as it has
intimidated many teachers of liberal or radical views and others
menaced or victimized by the witch hunt. But it did not frighten Harry
T. Moore.

On the contrary, it increased his determination to fight for
justice. He became more active than ever in the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People and in struggles to win and
protect the right to vote for Negroes in his state. And when he was
confronted with the Groveland “rape” frameup, he became a thorn in the
flesh of the white supremacists and Ku Kluxers and their protectors in
high office. He went around organizing and speaking at scores of
meetings, fearlessly defending the Groveland victims and boldly
demanding that McCall, the lyncher with a sheriff’s badge, should be
tried for the murder of Samuel Shepherd.

Knew What He Faced

We know now that he was taking his life into his hands
when he did these things. He must have known it too. But it did not
stop him. His mother says that when she cautioned him to be more
careful not long ago, he replied,

“Every advancement comes by way of sacrifice, and if
I sacrifice my life or my health I still think it is my duty for my
race.”

That is why it is correct to call Harry T. Moore a
martyr of the Negro struggle and of the general struggle of the working
people for a better world, he saw his duty and he did it, despite the
costs it entailed. He wanted to live too and to be happy, but he could
not be happy unless he offered his resistance to the misery and
injustice around him. In other words, he was a really moral man,
setting an example that should shine brightly for all time for the
youth of all races. He was a true son of great predecessors — of people
like Nat Turner and Harriet Tubman and John Brown and others who were
ready to risk their lives in the fight against oppression. We would be
ingrates, unworthy of the sacrifice he made, if we were content to
merely mourn his passing and then forget about him instead of devoting
ourselves to avenge his death and to complete the struggle he led so
well.

Misleading Figures on Lynching

The Nation (Jan. 5) was absolutely
correct when it insisted that such crimes as the murder of Harry T.
Moore “cannot be understood as senseless acts of depraved or prejudiced
individuals. On the contrary, they were essentially political crimes,
crimes deliberately committed for a purpose.” And the purpose cannot be
completely understood without examinatiort of a new trend that has
appeared in the last few years.

At the end of 1951 the Tuskegee Institute, a Negro institution which
issues annual lynching figures, announced that the total of lynchings
last year was — one. This report was widely publicized here and abroad
by the propagandists of capitalism; for them this constituted proof
that lynchings are diminishing year by year, that America is more and
more becoming the land of freedom and equality for the Negro people,
and that one of these days we will wake up and find that they are
treated just like other people.

They would be very happy if they could got the 15 million American
Negroes and the colored people who form a majority of the earth’s
population to believe in this picture of progress that goes ever onward
and upward until the arrival of the millenium. Because if what they
said was true, it might not be necessary to fight to end the
Jim Crow system — maybe people could just afford to sit back and wait
for it to die a natural death.

But it is a lie. The reason the capitalists and their political en
and boys in Washington go to the trouble of peddling this lie is that
they have set themselves the objective of dominating the whole world.
Part of their program for achieving this depends on force — economic
force through the dollars they are pumping into the dying capitalist
system all over the world, military force through armament that they
are trying to impose on unwilling countries in Europe, Asia and the
Middle East. But part also depends on propaganda — the propaganda that
the US is the champion and paragon of democracy.

The colored people abroad find that hard to swallow.

“If you are such lovers of democracy,” they ask,
“then how is it that you have become the partner of so many lifelong
bitter enemies of democracy like Chiang Kai-shek, Syngman Rhee, Franco,
the Nazi and Japanese generals and most of the other dictators who are
not behind the iron curtain?”

Along with that question goes another:

“If you love democracy so much, why do you treat
Negroes as second-class citizens, deny most of them the right to vote,
discriminate against them at the hiring gate or bar them from the
better jobs when you do hire them, subject them to humility and
brutality, segregate them in the armed forces and in so many parts of
your educational system, deny them the protection of anti-lynching and
anti-poll tax laws — why, if you love democracy so much and talk to us
about it so much, don’t you practice what you preach?”

This makes the US ruling class, its politicians,
diplomats and Voice of America squirm like fish on a hook.

And needless to say, the representatives of the bureaucrats in the
Kremlin never miss a chance, inside the United Nations and outside, to
make them squirm some more. Many people, including some “radicals” who
expect capitalism to end Jim Crow, wonder why the US government does
not rid itself of this embarrassment, disarm foreign suspicions and
deprive the Kremlin of one of its most effective propaganda themes. All
they would have to do is quit discriminating against Negroes and begin
treating them the same way as other citizens. But they don’t do it, for
reasons to be discussed later. Instead, they seek to get around their
embarrassment by juggling figures to show that lynching is diminishing
and conditions are improving, etc.

When we say this is a lie, we do not mean to challenge the official
lynching figures compiled every year. It is true that they have
declined temporarily. What we mean is that lynching has assumed new
forms. Everyone knows that lynchings are violence resulting in death
committed by a mob, by more than a few people — if only one person does
the killing, it is listed by the Tuskegee Institute as a murder and not
a lynching. (Harry T. Moore was not officially listed as a lynch
victim, presumably because it has not been proved that more than one
person killed him.) But there is another and more crucial aspect to
lynching — its purpose. The purpose is not so much to take a life —
that can just as easily be done by so-called legal procedure, in a Jim
Crow court, that is, by “legal lynching.” The purpose of a lynching is
not so much to take a life as it is to frighten, terrorize, silence,
demoralize other people who are permitted to go on living, but who arc
expected to cringe as long as they live and not dare to organize or
vote or go to court — just to live and work like a mule for the benefit
of others. That is the real aim of a lynching, and if it does not have
that effect it is not considered a success.

New Trend in Anti-Negro Terror

The point can be illustrated by the Groveland case. In
Groveland, Lake County, Fla., a large number of Negroes were working
and living under conditions of virtual peonage, a system about half-way
between slave labor and wage labor. After the war the Negro workers
began to complain about their conditions and talk about doing something
to improve them. When their employers heard about this, they decided to
do something drastic to throw the fear of god into their employees.
That was the background of the Groveland case in 1949, and when a white
woman yelled rape the employers had just what they wanted. They
unloosed a reign of terror that lasted over a week; Negro homes were
burned, Negroes were shot at if they ventured out of doors, and finally
400 Negro families had to flee out of the county. One Negro was shot
dead by a posse, three others were almost lynched and later were
convicted; one was given life imprisonment, two were sentenced to
death; when the Supreme Court ordered a new trial for the latter, a
sheriff shot them in cold blood, murdering one and leaving the other
for dead. But it was not these victims the ruling class was most
concerned about — they wanted blood and some bodies burning in the
electric chair so that they could point to them and remind the
remaining, living Negroes of what they could expect if they tried to
alter the wonderful American way of life as it is practiced in the
South.

Real Aim: To Frighten the Living

To frighten the living — that is the real aim of
lynching. When that is understood, we can see that there may be less of
the old-style type of lynchings, where mobs are used, but that
lynchings have continued as much as before, only in new forms. Today,
when they want to achieve the purpose of lynchings, they send out only
two or three men to shoot down a Negro who will serve as an example to
others, or they may even send out only one man, armed with a bomb,
which he can throw under a house where people are sleeping at night.
And in some cases they use the police instead. Because these people who
are so brave about murdering sleeping men and women don’t like to take
any risks, and even small vigilante committees face a risk that their
victim may resist. But with the police taking over the function of the
lynch mob there is practically no risk. The police have always been
noted for their brutality toward Negroes. Now, in addition, in
ever-increasing numbers, they are killing Negroes too, in the North and
the South.

It is estimated that in the city of Birmingham alone almost 100
Negroes have been shot or beaten to death on the streets or in the
police stations during the last 2½ years alone. Nobody knows
what the national total is, but it surely equals any annual total of
“official” lynchings recorded in the US since the early days of the Ku
Klux Klan. It is not a matter of punishing individual Negroes or of
letting the police work off their sadistic frustrations — the main aim
is to paralyze the members of the Negro community with fright, to make
them shudder every time they see a cop, to keep the memory of broken
and bloody bodies on their minds so that they will be afraid to talk
back or stand up for their rights. In other words, the same aim as the
old-style lynchings, only now committed under guise of law, now
protected by the police badge and uniform, now masked as “resisting an
officer” or “trying to escape.”

That is one of the new trends in the struggle for Negro equality.
The Negro people have been pressing forward — it is estimated that two
million of them will go to the polls in the South this year as compared
with about one million in 1948. Unable to sweet-talk them into
accepting second-class citizenship, the ruling class and its political
agents have decided to beat them into submission. It is impossible to
exaggerate the dangers presented by the new forms of lynching. If they
are not stopped where they are already being committed, then they will
spread into every state and city where the ruling class wants to keep
the Negro people down — that is, every state and city where Negroes
live.

Danger Evident Not Only to Radicals

Revolutionary socialists are not the only ones who
understand what is happening. The Psychology Department of the City
College of New York, 20 educators, sent a wire to Truman last November
after the sheriff of Lake County took the two handcuffed Groveland
defendants for a ride and shot them. They noted that the pattern for
denying Negroes their constitutional rights has shifted from mob
violence “to the more subtle forms of quasi-legal executions or
violence at the hands of ‘law enforcement’ officers.” The new pattern,
they said, would give “the aura of official sanction to racial murders”
and would expose all the people to “the dangers of a capricious,
jungle-like state.” (This is an acute observation, because once the
cops get such powers of life and death in their hands they will not
confine their use to Negroes but will employ them against whites as
well.) And they warned that “only the most immediate and strongest
action of the federal government can prevent the legal murder of a
great many more Negroes in the near future.” Events have already begun
to confirm this warning.

Another conservative source, Walter White, in his annual report for
the NAACP, declared:

“At times during the year justice and human rights in
America seemed to be standing still or even moving backward ... we saw
in our country a resurgence of violence — rioting, home burning,
bombings, police brutality and mockery of the revered American concept
of ‘equal justice under law.’ Cicero, Martinsville, Groveland,
Birmingham, Miami and Mims, the horror names of 1951, drove home more
strongly than ever the continuing and increasing need for the NAACP.”

Why No Action from Washington?

The International Executive Board of the CIO Auto
Workers — not one radical among them — protested the Groveland killing,
the murder of an NAACP member who had filed suit for the right to vote
in Louisiana and was shot down by a deputy sheriff, and the murder of a
Negro steward at sea by a white captain. These crimes were designated
as signs of “an intensification of terroristic aggression against
Negroes by officers charged with upholding and enforcement of the law.”
Urging Attorney General McGrath to arrest, indict and try the killers
for murder, the UAW Board wrote:

“Failure to take such action subverts all of our
lofty professions of democratic principles. The hour is late. Action
now is imperative.”

The hour certainly is late, but no action has been
forthcoming, despite thousands of appeals to Truman for the government
to step into the picture and do something to stop the terrorism. Not
one legal or semi-legal lyncher has been punished. Not one cop has been
fired. Not one bomb-thrower has been apprehended. The strongest
government in the world seems to be. helpless, or else tries to give
that impression. The mighty FBI has found nothing. The Department of
Justice can’t seem to get the wheels of justice moving. Are they really
so inefficient?

The answer is that it all depends on whom they are hunting. When
they want to catch a radical, nothing seems to stop them. The whole
machinery of the government is thrown into high gear, thousands of cops
and FBI agents labor ceaselessly, no financial expense is too high,
they lap wires and open mail, they set up a stoolpigeon system
extending across the whole country. And they get results — when they
really want them. So when they don’t get results we have good reason to
believe they don’t want them.

They arrest radicals and prosecute them and send them to jail, not
for employing force and violence — there has not been a single case of
this kind — but for allegedly conspiring to advocate force and
violence, a frameup assault on the Bill of Rights. But when it comes to
those who do not advocate but clearly commit force and violence, the
government seems paralyzed, bumbling, impotent. They are great at
hounding people whose only crime is that they express their opinions
but a complete dud when it comes to catching and punishing fascistic
elements who commit crimes in violation of all the federal, state and
local laws. Liberals think this is accidental, but it is not. The truth
is that the government is not really disturbed by fascist elements
while it is afraid of ideas and free speech and free press. This gives
a better and sharper insight into the true character of the government
and the capitalist ruling class than can be gotten in almost any other
way.

Our Warnings Confirmed

What is the government doing about the murder of Mr. and
Mrs. Harry T. Moore? Look first of all at Truman, the so-called great
civil libertarian and humanitarian. Not one word. He can’t be bothered
by such trifles. When US airmen fly over Hungarian territory in
violation of international law — you can imagine what would happen if a
Soviet or Hungarian plane flew over US territory without permission —
and then are arrested and fined, there is a great hubbub, Truman
demands restitution and firm action, and even after they are released
he vindictively demands that the case be taken before the UN. But when
people are murdered in his own country, in the state where he takes his
vacations, Truman is silent (and no newspaper reporter questions him
about it at his press conferences). Not that it would mean anything if
he did say something about the Moore case because he has proved that
his promises cannot be trusted anyhow. Action speaks louder than words.
And the inaction of the Truman administration also speaks louder than
words.

Attorney General McGrath promises “the full facilities of the FBI.”
Eventually he sends down two (2) FBI agents, who, when added to those
already stationed in Florida, make a grand total of nine (9). Which is
less than one-tenth as many as he set into action like bloodhounds when
four Stalinists convicted under the Smith Act jumped bail last summer.
Evidently expressing opinions that Truman and McGrath do not like is a
more heinous crime than murder. The FBI agents in Florida have achieved
exactly nothing. The whole thing is a farce. Because even if they
should arrest someone for “violating the federal civil rights” of Mr.
and Mrs. Moore, the penalty — the maximum penalty — would be one year
in prison and a few thousand dollars in fine! (Provided a Southern jury
could be found to convict the defendant.) That is the way the
government acts, that is the way it intends to keep acting — unless and
until it is compelled to do otherwise by the mass pressure of the
American people.

When Harry T. Moore was murdered, the Socialist Workers Party
immediately sounded the alarm. It warned that if his killers were not
punished, they would feel free to spread their violence to maintain
white supremacy and to extend their attacks to white workers and the
labor movement. This warning was confirmed almost as soon as it was
uttered. Recent issues of The Militant, by printing a
number of small news items that are lost in the back pages of most
papers, have shown that the bomb is joining TV and comic books as
symbols of American capitalist culture (which is ironical when we
recall that the favorite cartoon stereotype of a revolutionist used to
be a man with a bomb in his hand).

A white evangelist in Florida is warned that he will get the “Mims
treatment” if he does not stop preaching against sin so vigorously
(Moore’s home was in Mims). A crusader against vice in Alabama comes
home to find his house in smoke and his son blown 30 feet through the
air by a bomb, and he decides to move his family out of the state (why
he sent them to Florida for protection from bombs is a mystery). The
white sheriff of a North Carolina county complains that his deputies
cannot do their job at night in the rural areas because the Klan has
been flogging so many people that the residents have become jittery and
start firing their shotguns as soon as they hear a noise outside; the
sheriff says if this kind of thing goes on, why, it will not be
possible for his deputies to preserve law and order much longer. The
United Press reports a dynamite explosion near a Negro night club in
Dallas, Tex., and calls it the third such “apparently pointless”
bombing in less than a month. And now the scene shifts North, to
Chicago, where a black-powder bomb is exploded outside the new
headquarters of the AFL Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen’s
Union, shattering 40 windows and rocking the whole area; the police
began an investigation, of course — not of the labor haters, not of the
anti-union racists or the White Circle League, but of the CIO United
Packinghouse Workers Union!

What Is Being Done?

What is being done by the groups that are directly
affected by this new wave of terrorism? The NAACP, which is most
vitally involved, denounced the outrage, offered a reward for the
killers of Mr. and Mrs. Moore, held memorial meetings for them, and
urged McGrath to appoint a special prosecutor and grand jury (which he
refused to do). And then, two weeks after the bombing, it voted to
consult the labor leaders for a nationwide work stoppage, something it
had never done before and something which it did almost on the spur of
the moment under the pressure of the mass indignation over the Moore
case. All these measures were justified and progressive — but
inadequate.

The leaders of the labor movement too know they are involved, and
knew it before the bombing of the Chicago AFL union. They know that
union organizers and members will be next on the death list, that the
forces behind lynch terror are the same ones that seek to smash unions.
But beyond sending a few telegrams of protest, they do nothing. An
editorial in the Jan. 9 AFL News-Reporter concludes
by “wondering” if maybe “reactionaries everywhere won’t stop to think
whether stirring up race hatred in order to win an election is worth
the damage it helps to cause.” This is not a summons for the people to
fight the reactionaries but an appeal to the reactionaries to think
over what they are doing and decide if the terrorism really benefits
them — as if the reactionaries do not know what they are doing.

The Socialist Workers Party takes an altogether different approach.
Farrell Dobbs, National Chairman and presidential candidate of the SWP,
wrote a letter to the NAACP, AFL and CIO and 22 other powerful national
organizations scheduled to meet in Washington on Feb. 17-18 to lobby
for a change in Senate rules that make it possible to filibuster all
civil rights legislation to death. Speaking on behalf of the SWP, Dobbs
urged them to revise the plans for their conference — to turn it into a
broader affair, to summon a mass march on Washington by tens of
thousands instead of staging a lobby with a few hundred polite
representatives; to call mass meetings and demonstrations in cities all
over the country at the same time; to endorse the proposal for a
nationwide work stoppage; and to support the idea of forming defense
guards to protect lives and homes and liberties which the authorities
have failed to protect.

The Need for Defense Guards

The proposal for defense guards originated in Florida,
and not with the SWP. For several months in Miami bombs have been
thrown or planted in Negro housing projects, Jewish synagogues, and a
Catholic church. When the police failed to stop this, here is what
happened, according to the Jan. 2 New York Times:

“Members of the Jewish War Veterans recently
suggested that 325 of their members be deputized to guard synagogues,
but this was turned down after several rabbis had issued a statement
declaring that to resort to ‘vigilante action at this time is to
succumb to hysteria and panic’.”

The subsequent killing of Mr. and Mrs. Moore,
undoubtedly encouraged when the racists saw they could act with
impunity in Miami, proves how blind those rabbis were to put their
confidence in the police. In the first place, defense guards need not
be deputized; when needed, they can and should be, formed without
getting the recognition or approval of the police, who usually act in
connivance with the lynchers anyhow. In the second place, formation of
defense guards is not “vigilante action” but its very opposite —
protection against vigilante action. And in the third place it is not
panic or hysteria to protect your life when the police fail to do so —
but good sense.

The bombers respect only those who can oppose them effectively; they
will think twice about going out to take another life when they see
Negroes and Jews and workers banding together and promising to resist.
Even the police will think it over before clubbing a helpless victim if
they know he has friends who will come to his aid. Without ever having
heard of the Socialist Workers Party, the Jewish veterans in Miami
sensed this; so did 18 whites who stood armed guard around the church
of the preacher threatened with the Mims treatment in Jacksonville; and
so did the Negroes who formed a guard around the home of a Negro farmer
in North Carolina after a bomb had been exploded there.

What Impedes the Leaders?

Farrell Dobbs’ proposals were not answered by the labor,
Negro, liberal and civic organizations. But they made it clear that
they rejected them by changing the name of their lobbying conference in
February to the “Leadership Conference on Civil Rights” — an obvious
refusal to call for mass action. But what about the proposal for a
nationwide work stoppage, which was made first by the NAACP itself? The
NAACP authorized the setting up of a committee to consult the labor
leaders. What happened? Was it set up, and if it was set up, why isn’t
it functioning? If it is functioning, why is the NAACP so silent about
the whole thing, which was their idea and not ours? If the labor
leaders refuse to go along with the proposal, why doesn’t the NAACP
announce this so that the people can do something about it? Why, if
they say this is a situation of crisis, don’t they act accordingly?
What are they waiting for?

The answer can be found by examining the new form of propaganda that
both Negro and labor leaders have become very fond of in recent years.
This has already been done in The Militant, but it
bears repetition and amplification. Today this propaganda is being
applied to just about every public issue that can be thought of. When
Truman asks for another five billions in new taxes, he seeks to justify
this unpopular demand by its necessity for the struggle against
communism. But his Republican opponents say hew taxes are out of the
question for the same reason — they would hurt the economy and weaken
the struggle against communism. When Philip Murray asks for a steel
wage increase, he explains it is needed so the steel workers can
contribute their maximum effort to the fight against Stalin. Fairless
of US Steel retorts that a wage increase would undermine the steel
industry, which would please no one so much as Stalin. Of course the
class struggle continues just the same. The steel workers are not
impressed with Fairless’ arguments, nor he with theirs. This shows that
propaganda has certain limits, and while it can mix things up it cannot
change the realities of social life and struggle.

False Propaganda Paralyzes Action

But it can mix things up, which is why it must be paid
some attention when it is applied to the Negro question, where the
argument runs like this: Jim Crow, discrimination, segregation,
bombings are all crimes because they help Stalin, and should be ended
so that Negroes will be able and willing to go all-out in the crusade
against communism. This was the theme sounded over and over by Philip
Murray and Walter Reuther at the last CIO convention, and given a
timely application by Walter White, secretary of the NAACP, when he
said the murder of Harry T. Moore was “one of the greatest services
that could have been performed for Joe Stalin.”

The duty of leaders, labor or Negro, is to educate the people, teach
them to know causes and effects — otherwise, no lasting progress is
possible. Specifically, it is their job to teach the masses what causes
Jim Crow oppression, who benefits from it, how all workers are harmed
by it, why they should fight it, and how to fight it effectively. The
basic cause is the profit system, and the beneficiaries are the
capitalists who do everything they can to keep the workers divided
along any lines possible — racial, geographic, religious, sexual, etc.
Because the more the workers are divided, the easier it is for the
employers to exploit them and squeeze the maximum profit out of their
labor. The workers have to be shown that Jim Crow benefits the ruling
class, and that anything that perpetuates Jim Crow is harmful to their
own interests. It must be made plain that Jim Crow is not the product
of Stalin. This is not said in defense of Stalin, but of a historically
incontrovertible fact. Jim Crow is the product of capitalism, American
capitalism; its seat is in Washington, not Moscow. Any propaganda that
obscures this fact is harmful and not helpful to the Negroes and their
white allies.

The Roots of Jim Crow

The workers must be encouraged and taught to figure out
their problems from the standpoint of how their problems affect the
class and individual conditions and liberties of the masses themselves.
When the question of a strike comes up, workers should be conditioned
to ask: “Will this strike help me and the other workers, or will it
help the capitalists, who benefit from our losses and lose from our
gains?” They should not be bamboozled into introducing extraneous
questions, like: “Will this strike help Stalin, or hurt him?” Trying to
figure out what is going on in Stalin’s mind (something the masterminds
in Washington have not done with perceptible success) can result only
in confusion, lack of determination, demoralization and inactivity —
which are of benefit only to the capitalists and the white supremacists.

The argument is not altogether new; only the form is. In World War
II it had a slightly different wording, namely, will this or that
action help Hitler? For some groups this became the sole and supreme
criterion for everything. The Communist Party was most guilty of this.
If workers wanted to resist speedup, or if Negroes wanted to march on
Washington to protest Jim Crow, the Stalinists opposed and fought them
on the grounds that such action was disruptive of “national unity” and
therefore helpful to Hitler. The Stalinists became the most vicious and
virulent opponents of labor and Negro struggles because their policy of
considering everything from the viewpoint of how it allegedly affected
Miller led them to shut their eyes to how these things affected the
workers and Negroes, and to subordinate and oppose every progressive
struggle under the guise of fighting Hitler. Those who use this method
in its new form will do the same and will play into the hands of the
reactionary ruling class, which is already stressing the idea that
there must be no more conflicts in this country because Stalin wants us
to be fighting one another instead of him.

Who Really Benefits from Terrorism?

But even if it is conceded for the sake of argument that
the murder of Mr. and Mrs. Moore is a service for Stalin (in the sense
that he makes use of it, not that he committed it) — so what? Is that
all it is? On the contrary, it is also a service for the American
ruling class — in fact, a much bigger service for them than for him.
The purpose of Jim Crow terrorism, as we noted earlier, is to keep the
Negro “in his place.” That is where American capitalism has tried to
keep him since 1876 when they made a deal with the Southern landlords,
businessmen and Ku Kluxers at the expense of the Bill of Rights and the
Negro people, and that is where they are trying to keep him today.
Stalin may reap certain indirect propaganda benefits from Jim Crow
terrorism, but American capitalism benefits from it directly,
politically and economically, and in a big way. That is why they do
nothing to stop it.

The Moore murders embarrass them in the United Nations. But not
enough so that they want to end Jim Crow at home. For them it is
cheaper to pay the price of being embarrassed than of having anything
done to overthrow the Jim Crow system. So Walter White is telling only
half the truth. The murder of Harry T. Moore is a service for Truman as
well as for Stalin.

White, Murray and Reuther make a great deal of noise about how
embarrassing Jim Crow is to American capitalism. The Truman
administration, which would not be in power without the support of the
South, knows all about this embarrassment, even better than its labor
and Negro supporters. But that does not stop them from maintaining the
Jim Crow system. Why this is so, why the ruling class retains the
“embarrassment” of Jim Crow and desperately resists all efforts to end
it — that is the question which White, Murray and Reuther never even
think of asking. But it is the decisive question and must be answered.

Why Washington Prefers “Embarrassment”

Abolishing Jim Crow is no easy thing. Even if they
decided in Washington to do it, it would still not be easy. Because the
ruling class in the South would not like the idea. That is putting it
very mildly. They know that Truman’s only interest is in getting Negro
votes and not in threatening the South’s sacred way of life, but they
go wild with rage every time he utters a few innocuous words about poll
taxes or FEPC. And if the government actually tried to end Jim Crow in
the South, we would be confronted with the threat of another civil war.

In other words, the only way to abolish Jim Crow in this country is
by making a revolution in the South, which is the powerhouse and
breeding ground of the Jim Crow system. The present Southern ruling
class would have to be thrown out of power, and that would be a
revolution, a political revolution. But no matter how started, such a
political revolution would inevitably tend to develop into a social and
economic overturn, which in turn would upset the whole national
structure. And that is why the capitalists who are running things will
never consent to the abolition of the Jim Crow system. And nothing will
shake them in this. They would much rather risk alienating the whole
world than risk a revolution threatening their own profits and
privileges at home.

The final note in the White-Murray propaganda is a plea to the
ruling class to end their great “inconsistency.”

How, they ask, can you get ready to fight a war for democracy in
Europe and Asia and continue to treat the Negro at home in the most
undemocratic fashion? Can’t you see that to be consistent you must give
the Negro democracy in America too?

But since the capitalists know that they are not preparing for a war
for democracy in any respect, this alleged inconsistency does not
bother them at all. Their foreign policy and their domestic policy,
despite what the labor and Negro leaders say, are cut from the same
cloth. They are not getting ready to bring the blessings of democracy
to the people of Asia or Europe any more than they are getting ready to
extend them to American Negroes. On the contrary, they intend to
enslave the people both at home and abroad, and are proceeding to
destroy civil liberties at home precisely so that nobody here will be
able to interfere with their reactionary program abroad.

Where There Is a Contradiction

Walter White and Philip Murray regard the war in Korea
as a crusade for democracy, but millions of American Negroes, when they
heard Truman give the order for US intervention, which he called a
“police action,” must have thought to themselves: “I sure feel sorry
for the Koreans if they get the same kind of ‘police action’ we’ve been
getting.” And they do — the police action against colonial masses in
Korea is qualitatively the same thing as police action against
minorities here at home, although on a bigger scale and with bigger
weapons.

So there is a great contradiction, but it is with the labor and
liberal leaders who act as apologists for the imperialists. They have
got to make a choice themselves. If they keep on supporting capitalism
and its foreign policy and its wars then they will have to subordinate
labor and Negro struggles, shove them into the background the way the
Stalinists did in World War II (and as the liberals are already
half-doing by their timorous policy on the Moore case). Or else they
will have to increase their opposition to Jim Crow, the wage freeze,
high prices, big profits and the witch hunt, and break with the
imperialist foreign policy that conflicts with every progressive
movement and struggle in the world today.

That is their problem, and they will have to meet it. Revolutionary
socialists have made their choice, and nothing will swerve them from
it. They are and will remain implacable opponents of capitalism and its
Jim Crow, and nothing will persuade them to moderate or abandon that
struggle for a single day, rain or shine, war or peace, Murray or
White, Truman, Taft or Eisenhower. Because they understand that if the
struggle is stopped, if the fight is weakened, then things will become
even worse than they are now.

An Instructive Lesson from Jewish History

Nothing could be more deadly for the Negro people than a
fatalistic belief in progress — automatic, self-moving progress, the
chief staple of liberalism and reformism. This is borne out by what
happened to the Jews. Before the first world war, when he was still a
Marxist, Karl Kautsky wrote a book which was revised after the war and
translated into English under the title, Are the Jews A Race?
This book is still worth reading as an example of the conceptions of
the socialist movement about the Jewish question at that time. It
contains some historical and anthropological material, an analysis of
economic causes of anti-Semitism, etc. But its most interesting chapter
is the one on the assimilation of the Jews, containing a number of
tables of statistics showing that gradually the Jews were intermingling
more and more with Christians and intermarrying with them at a really
remarkable rate — in some European countries during the early part of
the century, one out of every three or four Jews was marrying non-Jews
and great numbers of them were being converted to Christianity.

All in all, there seemed good ground to accept the prevailing
belief, shared even by the socialists, that the Jewish question was
solving itself through the assimilation of the Jews. An appealing
notion — but how appallingly false! It proves that history, and
especially the history of oppressed groups, does not move forward in a
straight line but that it zigs and zags, that conditions can arise
which will wipe out in a single decade all the gains that have been
painfully accumulated in a century of strenuous effort. How empty and
remote the statistics in Kautsky’s book appear alongside of the single,
lone statistic we became acquainted with after World War II — six
million Jews exterminated under Hitler in a few brief years.

And so the Negro people must be warned: Remember what happened to
the Jews. They too were told in assuring tones about how things were
getting better day by day and all they had to do was wait and be
patient with the “gradual” method and then the happy day of equality
would dawn by itself. Remember what happened to the Jews in Europe and
do not let anybody lull you with consoling statistics! The day may come
in this country too when the ruling class, determined to conquer the
whole world, will try to drown the Negro people in blood as an example
and scapegoat for the other victims of capitalism.

A Century of Experience in Negro Struggle

The idea that the Negro question would solve itself, so
to speak, seemed to have validity once upon a time. This capitalist
system we live under was progressive in its youth. Less than a hundred
years ago the capitalists united, although reluctantly at first, with
Negroes and workers and farmers to wage a bloody civil war that ended
in the smashing of the chattel slave system. There was reason then to
think that under capitalism Negroes could eventually prosper or at
least breathe the free air of equality. Then, after the Civil War, came
the period of Reconstruction, whose first stages were the brightest
chapter in the book of American history, when the capitalist government
did not hesitate to suppress the former slaveholders and to keep them
suppressed and to use federal troops and guns in support of the
Negroes’ struggle for freedom.

But that was when capitalism was young and thriving and moving
ahead. Today this profit system is old and decrepit, attacked by
incurable diseases, demented by illusions of grandeur and vain hopes
that it can succeed in the program of world conquest that Hitler failed
to achieve. It’s a different animal now. Since the betrayal of
Reconstruction, which gave the reins of power in the South back to the
former slaveowners, there has been no reason whatever to expect
anything progressive from the capitalists Besides, why should the Negro
people expect that their capitalist oppressors are going to grant them
more rights at a time when the capitalists are busily engaged in
withdrawing rights from the white workers, staging a witch hunt to
destroy freedom of speech and press and association for the white
workers? Preparations for an imperialist world war do not portend the
flowering of democracy for the Negro people — they signify an attempt
[illegible in original] way, to wipe out the democratic rights of all
the masses. Even without the evidence of new and spreading forms of
lynching and terrorism, it does not take much vision to see that the
prospects for things getting better by themselves are very slim, and
are going to get slimmer unless they are resisted vigorously,
militantly, in the spirit of Harry T. Moore.

Moore Pointed to the Road

The solution is not easy, and anyone who thinks it is,
is fooling himself. These are not easy times in which to make progress.
Many people who know that the answer lies in struggle have been
frightened by the witch hunt and have retired to the sidelines. But
struggle is still the only answer, and no slick or cheap substitutes
will do. Sending petitions to Truman will not bear any better results
now than in the past. Proposals for a boycott of Florida citrus fruits
and vacation centers are not harmful as such — unless the idea is
created that they are the answer. By themselves they do no harm, but
they cannot do much good either. Struggle, backed up by the readiness
to sacrifice that Harry T. Moore exhibited, remains the only answer.

The nature of the struggle is primarily political. If the government
wants to, it can put an end to terrorism in the South, which is itself
a political thing. Because the government does not really want to, the
government must be changed. Not changed by shifting from control by one
capitalist party to control by another capitalist party, but changed
from a government representing the interests of the capitalist class to
one representing the interests of the workers, Negroes, working
farmers, housewives and youth — representing them, controlled by them,
responsible to them and replaceable by them. If the government wants
to, it can end discrimination in industry. Because it does not want to,
it must be changed. And so it goes with all the other problems facing
the labor and Negro movements — they are political problems, which can
be solved only through political action and struggle.

We revolutionary socialists are hot able by ourselves alone to set
into motion our program for combatting terrorism. That is because we
are still a small minority. But even a small minority, armed with a
correct program, can exert a tremendous influence. The Abolitionists
also started out small, a persecuted minority whose leaders were tarred
and feathered and jailed and lynched, but within a few decades they
ended up by seeing two-thirds of the nation take up arms to defend the
anti-slavery principles they had stuck to so persistently during dark
and troubled times.

Future Belongs to Revolutionary Socialism

And revolutionary socialism will not remain a minority;
because our ideas conform to reality and are right, they will attract
the majority of the people, and they will triumph. Some have been
scared off by the witch hunt, and others have been corrupted into
compliance and apathy by “prosperity” — but the ruling class cannot
stop ideas or their spread because it cannot do away with the
reactionary conditions of life that produce those ideas and it cannot
prevent the rise of new generations [illegible in original] whom the
future rests and who will not want the future to be like the past. Our
confidence in the future is not the result of wishful thinking or of an
ability to hop ourselves up, but the product of scientific study and
understanding of society and history and the class struggle.

Some people think that it is visionary, hopelessly impractical and
idealistic to continue a struggle to end capitalism against, such
seemingly great odds. The same view was held by most people 100 years
ago when a minority suggested that it was advisable, necessary and
possible to end the system of slavery. “The slave system is here to
stay,” they were told, “and only crazy fanatics will refuse to try to
live with it, and maybe fix it up, patch it or reform it here or
there.” But from their own experience with the slave system, the
majority of the American people were forced to the conclusion that
slavery had to go, and they had to accept the program of the
revolutionists whom they had derided as crackpots.

Experience with capitalism, especially with capitalism in its death
agony, is going to have the same consequences in our own time. It is
going to teach the people that if they want to live, capitalism must
die, and that if they want peace and dignity they will first have to
employ militancy in taking power away from the capitalists. It is not
the revolutionary socialists, primarily, who will teach these things,
but capitalism itself. The Harlem paper, the New York Age,
says:

“The blast (that blew up Harry T. Moore’s home)
exploded all hopes that the fight for equality in politics, education,
the courts and other spheres of life in the South could be won with
little or no bloodshed.”

We have said that too, but events say it better. We’re
educating all whom we can reach to the best of our ability — but
capitalism is educating them too and in a way that will have deeper,
more lasting, profound and revolutionary effects than any words we can
speak or write.

The enemies of Jim Crow, war and thought control are still on the
defensive. But that is no reason for despair. The Nation
is correct when it observes that the Moore bombing “is likely to bring
about an imponderable change in the political thinking of American
Negroes” and when it notes that pressure for militant action is coming
from “rank-and-file Negroes whose patience is utterly exhausted not
only with Dixiecrat provocation but with the relaxed middle-class
attitude of some of their leaders, who have been quite willing to issue
further political bills of credit to Mr. Truman on the basis of his
stale civil rights speeches of 1948 and the lesser evil premise.” A
similar process is certain to develop among the white workers. Whether
it likes it or not, capitalism is forced to continue to produce all
kinds of opportunities for awakening the masses and driving them into
struggle against conditions as they are. If the politically advanced
workers know how to stick to their guns and grab hold of all the
opportunities offered them, then they will win to their side all the
other workers whose needs are satisfied by the program of revolutionary
socialism, and then it will be goodbye forever to capitalism, and all
of its products like Jim Crow terrorism.